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Link the Short Tail - Blog the Long Tail

There is a lot of controversy about linking however its what works and continues to work for me for the last six plus years. I have a lot of top ranked sites that were ranked because of link building. Link building is almost a relgious discussion because for each person who has done well with link building it seems that someone knows someone who was "blacklisted" by Google or Yahoo for Link Building. We've never been blacklisted; knock on wood; however we have really started to work on the blogging front to round out the SEO/SEM part of the business.

Ultimately for a new website (of a new agent or someone who is just getting on the web) to get traffic, Google needs to know it exists. Then Google needs to know that you are in fact a website worth ranking. The only way to do that is through link building. Some will be one way links as in Adword Campaigns, Directory Submissions, links from the Chamber of Commerce or your brokerage in your city. Others may be pay links from your newspaper, or other advertising medium. All of that will only get you so far. Even if you are a blogging fool it will take a while before you are blogging on something unique enough for Google to rank high.

Now if you do reciprocal link building for your community, like we do with Bellingham Real Estate, with other agents and you get a few hundred incoming links from other agents you will become highly relevant compared to your competition. You'll also be able to pass on link juice to your blogs which means that even your content will be ranked better then just blogging alone.

Ultimately it is combination of efforts that will get you the best results IMHO.

All the Best,

Glenn Sanford
--
Founder / CEO
BuyerTours Realty LLC &
Working The Magic LLC
Check out our Real Estate SEO Blog

Posted by Glenn Sanford on 12/14/2008 07:07 PM

Comments (5)

SEO & Blogging in the Online Marketing Channel

real estate seo, blogging, content

5 Comments on Link the Short Tail - Blog the Long Tail

DEC

Hi Glenn,

A question, long-tail vs. linking, two different things imho. Or do you have a different undersanding because I certainly could be wrong.

There has been a lot of discussion here in the Rain on long-tail vs. SEO.

Lynda,

Long-Tail and Linking are normally talked about together because they come from two different camps of online lead generation. Long-Tail refers to those more obscure search terms that get typed into the search engines maybe a few times a month that brings up a post with a combination of words that Google sees as relevant.

Linking provides the juice for shorter tails to get found and to make those pages authority pages which can pass down link juice to the rest of the pages on the site.

The reality is that the camps should merge since both are valid strategies to generate online leads. If you do both, you should generate significantly more leads then if you do one exclusively without the other.

Glenn

Hi Glenn,

Thanks for the nice follow up, makes sense to me, but it sounds like linking, seo and the long tail could be 3 different things. Or am I just splitting hairs here, you sound like you know exactly what you're doing! I understand the concept/benefit of Google Juice though linking, it's certainly helped our organic web presence.

Have you seen the video on the subject here in the Rain? It was done by Dustin Luther a proponent of the long-tail and Brian Brady in support of SEO.

Lynda,

SEO = Search Engine Optimization - So anything that improves your ranking for specific keywords on the Search Engines could be considered SEO.

Two Major Ways to do SEO: On Page SEO - Essentially content on the page you are optimizing. & Linking using those Keywords as Anchors in the pages that link to you. Even writing an ActiveRain post and linking it with specific keywords from your posts is a form of link building.

Long Tail - If you do a search for: "Condo Monthly Dues Fairhaven" on Google you should come to http://realestate.bellingham.net/ . That is a blog post and a Long Tail becaue it is very specific.

Short Tail: Bellingham WA Real Estate - Highly competitive and a shorter tail. We wouldn't come up #1 for that term without a strong linking campaign.

As far as the video I haven't seen it. I know Dustin fairly well and we have in the past gone about generating leads completely differently in that he is almost all Long Tail.

You can compare the results of long term blogging vs. Linking without much long tail by typing in raincityguide.com into http://www.semrush.com/ (Dustin's long time site) and comparing it to SeattlePowerSearch.com which is one of my sites which is almost all link building around the term "Seattle Real Estate".

However we want to build out content now and get the long tail since the heavy lifting of aggregating eyeballs has already occurred.

Glenn

Hi Glenn,

Thanks again for the detailed response. And yes, I've cruised around Dustin's site quite a few times. I've been in a few of his classes the past few years and I've always learned from him.

Keep up the great work!

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